Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Open access and Africa

In
November I reported
that PLOS CEO Elizabeth
Marincola is leaving the open access publisher in order to take up a position as Senior
Advisor for Science Communication and Advocacy at an African organisation.

At the
time, PLOS said it could not say exactly where Marincola was going as it had to wait until the organisation
concerned had held its board meeting in December.

But last
week Marincola confirmed to The Scientist that the
organisation she will be joining is the African
Academy of Sciences (AAS), based in Nairobi, Kenya. (I am not aware that PLOS
itself has put out a press release on this). Marincola will be leaving PLOS at
the end of the year (this week), with PLOS Chief Financial Officer Richard
Hewitt serving as interim CEO from January 1st 2017.

We can
surely assume that Marincola will be advocating strongly for open access in her
new position at the AAS.

But where
does this leave PLOS? I discussed
this and the challenges I believe PLOS currently faces in November, but I was
not able to get Marincola’s views. In a Q&A
published yesterday, however, The
Scientist asked Marincola where she saw PLOS’ place in today’s open-access publishing
marketplace.

Marincola
replied, “The first and primary mission of PLOS when it was founded was to make
the case that open-access publishing could be a sustainable business, whether
in a nonprofit environment or a for-profit environment. So the very fact we
have a lot of competition now is extremely satisfying to us and it is, in
itself, a major part of our vision. As Harold Varmus said
when he cofounded PLOS, if we could put ourselves out of business because the
whole world becomes open-access STM publishing, that would be the greatest
testament to our achievements.”

Meanwhile at Elsevier

Marincola
is not the only publisher to have developed an interest in open access, in Africa, and in the
African Academy of Sciences. In 2014 Elsevier announced
that it was partnering with AAS to support researchers by means of a publishing
training programme. This, it said, would include offering access to Elsevier
Publishing Connect and providing support for hosting live, online webinars.

And last
year SciDev.netreported
that Elsevier is planning to launch a new African open access mega journal
(presumably in the style of PLOS
ONE). This would be free to readers, but authors and their organisations
would have to pay to publish – although SciDev.net
indicated that internal discussions were taking place over whether publishing fees
should be waived for the first five years.

SciDev.net anticipated that the
new journal would be launched this year, with the first papers being published
in 2017. If the journal is still planned, then presumably the launch date has slipped.

Clearly
there is growing interest in promoting open access and OERin Africa. But some believe that the involvement of people and organisations from the Global North can be a mixed blessing, as they can end up setting the agenda in a way that is not conducive to local conditions. One African tweeter commented
recently, “The agenda for, and lead in, African studies should be set by
African scholars.”

The same
sentiment is often expressed about publishing and publishers, especially when large for-profit companies
like Elsevier get involved. In a blog post last year University of Cape Town OA
advocate Eve
Graysaid
of the planned new mega-journal: “Could this venture under the Elsevier banner provide the
impact and prestige that the continent’s research has been so sadly lacking? Or
could it be simply that it could provide a blank slate for Elsevier,
experimenting in the face of market uncertainty? Or, at its crudest, just a neo-colonial
land-grab in the face of challenges in the markets that Elsevier dominates?”

But as always with open access and scholarly publishing there are no simple answers, nothing can be predicted, and opinion is invariably divided.Postscript: I emailed the African Academy of Sciences and asked whether Marincola will be working on Elsevier's new mega-journal in any way. As of writing this, I have yet to receive a reply.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Elizabeth Marincola was never truly involved in PLoS ONE. Actually, revenue tanked while she was there because she never prioritized PLoS One needs. She was an ineffective CEO and was forced out because she didn't engage with the staff or the community. She alienated everyone in the organization that was interested in growing or innovating the publishing operations. If someone was asking for help in creating a PLoS One clone, she would be the least experienced PLoS veteran to work with.

It's true that Elizabeth Marincola was an ineffectual CEO and was eventually drummed out by both senior staff and the Board after hanging on far longer than was expected by insiders. And it’s likely that her position with the AAS is merely a face-saving, titular role convenient to her for personal reasons.

More importantly, her characterization of PLOS’ mission is sadly limited. If PLOS’ mission was to prove that OA could be sustainable, it would have achieved that years ago when PLOS ONE took off. The mission is about transformation, which PLOS has fallen very short in delivering on. Now, with a CFO in charge, a failing revenue base, the same Board in place that appointed Marincola, and a misdirected goal of spreading its technology far and wide rather than OA, it will hardly be any more likely to transform STM publishing in the future.

Wait until you see their financial results for this year and you'll see how ineffective she really was. She was kicked out because she had no clue how to run a business. In 2013 the PLOS BOD decided to kick out their CEO and CFO due to strategic differences in opinion. They also booted most of the senior management in place later that year. Under the old regime, PLOS was thriving and profitable. Fast forward to today, they're losing money, laying people off, spent millions on development of a journal management system they ended up trashing, and PLOS ONE is having it's lunch eaten by Scientific Reports. So, the question to the BOD is, how's that decision worked out for you?